4 Social Media Campaign Ideas to Steal from Top Business

Editor´s note: This is a guest post by Shahzad Saeed, a freelance blogger for hire. He blogs on ecommerce, marketing and CRO. You can follow him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed.

Social media marketing is no longer just an optional marketing opportunity especially if you’re on a limited budget. Over the past few years, companies have been using social networks as a platform for increasing brand awareness and acquiring customers. In fact, we can’t deny that social media now plays a major role in influencing your customers’ purchasing decisions. Read here how to use Social Media campaigns to improve your sales strategies.

57% of consumers say they’re influenced to think more highly of business after seeing positive comments or praise online. However, only 14% marketers tie social media to sales level because social networks are publishing platform, but not a selling platform.

In fact, if you’re running an ecommerce store, you may know that choosing the right ecommerce tool is critical for your business. It’s because it is harder to back out from your original decision once you picked the tool.

Similarly, picking only the right social platform for marketing is also critical for your business. It helps you to narrow your focus only to those particular social networking sites, resulting in bringing better results. In fact, not every social platform might be the right one for your business. If you’re not sure which one you should pick, the below tips will guide you.

Facebook: Best suited for software, mobile apps and B2C brands

Twitter: Publications and B2C brands.

YouTube: Brands in which visual content is critical

Google+: Brands aimed at male professionals

LinkedIn: B2B recruiters and service providers

Pinterest: Brands that primarily aimed at female customers

Now that you’ve got an idea about choosing the right social networking platform, let’s take a look at a few examples of social media campaigns that may inspire you.

1. Build social proof

Did you know that you can grow your follower base of your company by leveraging your existing followers?

If you’ve been following the trends of mobile apps on social media, you might have noticed that social sites are recently flooded with Prisma photos. If you’ve been living under a rock or if you’ve never heard about Prisma before, let me explain what it is. It is an app that transforms your photos into awesome artworks almost instantly. Within five weeks of its launch on iOS and five days of its launch on Android, the app had clocked 10 million downloads on each platform respectively.

The tremendous growth of Prisma app is not a rocket science. All they did is leveraged the power of social media. The popularity of the app has skyrocketed in a few weeks because Prisma-altered photos are spreading on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram by its users.Undoubtedly, the best thing about these kinds of user-generated content on social networks is that they act as a social proof for your product.

Yes, social proof works like a wildfire. Humans have a tendency to trust and follow the actions and choices of other people. By building social proof on social networks with user-generated content, you’re making a positive perception amongst your potential customers and your brand will be perceived as influential in your niche.

With that said, you shouldn’t necessarily be huge in terms of user adoption similar to Prisma in order to take advantage of user-generated content. You could find many small case studies if you’re looking for inspirations.

For instance, Tourism Australia encourages users to post photos on social media during their Australian visit with hashtags #SeeAustralia and #RestaurantAustralia. They also pick some of them every week and republish it on their Instagram account.

2. Make your followers engaged with your brand

One of the best things about your loyal followers is that they’re your brand advocates who would recommend their friends to start using your product by word of mouth advertising. In social networks, this means they’re very likely to share your content with their friends, in turns increasing the reach of your products.

That being said, when creating content for social networks, make sure you’re not always trying to sell your products directly. It’s because, at its core, social media sites are publishing and sharing platform. Think of what matters to your audience at the most and add value to their conversations.

Grammarly’s Facebook Page is a perfect example of adding value to the conversation of their followers. They consistently produce high quality content on their blog and often share them with their followers on social networks.

Here are a few things you can learn from Grammarly’s social media strategy.

Use optimal image: Always use optimal size image on your blog posts, so when they’re shared on Facebook it will always produce a beautiful preview of your image.

Customize your copy: It is always better to customize the copy of your posts while sharing your blog posts. If you’d like to automate the sharing process, you can do it by using Revive Old Post Additionally, you can track your clicks and share content to multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Ask questions: Grammarly encourages followers to engage with their content by asking relevant questions on Facebook. When followers comment on the posts, it increases the reach of the post.

Add value: Even when they’re promoting their product, they try to add value to their posts by sharing a useful tip and ensure that the post doesn’t look spammy or promotional.

So if you’re undervaluing the importance of retaining your existing lapsed customers, chances are you’re leaving lots of money on the table.

One of the best ways to bring your existing or potential customers back to your business is by remarketing. By remarketing on Facebook and Twitter, you can display a customized ad and encourage them to make a purchase on your website.

If you’re looking to start a remarketing campaign, below are a few tips that might help.

Frequency capping: In AdWords, this limits number of times your ad appears to the same person. While you can always encourage your potential customers to return to your website to make a purchase or sign up for your product, do keep in mind that you may need to show an ad for a specific number of times before you can turn them into a customer. Studies show that on average, it takes at least 3 to 4 visits to your website for your prospect to actually think about buying from you.

Facebook Custom Audience: Custom Audience is a feature that lets you upload your email list to Facebook database in order to compare them to that of Facebook users and show ads only when they find a match. For retention, you may upload emails of lapsed customers, so you can create a laser targeted ads specifying their needs and interests.

4. Offer customer service

According to Customers That Stick, poor customer service is the reason why 82% of U.S customers leave a business.

Another study reveals that refusing to communicate through social media can be harmful to companies and found that companies who ignore support requests on social media see an average churn rate that’s 15% higher than companies who don’t.

It doesn’t matter what you think of offering customer service through social media. The reality is your customers always expect you to reply to their support requests via social media. However, you shouldn’t necessarily start a new Twitter account for managing support requests. Rather you could use built-in customer support feature of Twitter.

With the release of this latest feature, now businesses will be able to clearly display on their Twitter profile if their account offers customer service, and in what times those accounts are active. These businesses’ profiles will now be able to display a prominent ‘Message’ button to start a Direct Message so people know the business offers support privately.

Author-Bio: Shahzad Saeed is a freelance blogger for hire. He blogs on ecommerce, marketing and CRO. You can follow him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed.